It would be hard to find a household in the U.S. that hasn’t been touched by the pandemic-driven changes in healthcare over the past year. Those changes have been quantified in some staggering numbers.
First, take telehealth. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), during the very first week of the pandemic, which it placed at the final week of March 2020, telehealth visits rose 154 percent over 2019.
Next, prescription delivery services were a novelty before the pandemic but have now attracted the likes of Walmart and Uber.
Even lab testing has spiked, going from $115.9 billion in 2020 to an expected $125.5 billion this year.
Telehealth, delivery and testing. Patients who have tried to get medical care over the last year will look at that triumvirate as a series of delays, high costs and maximum friction. But at least one company has looked at the set of circumstances and saw an opportunity.
As NowRx CEO Cary Breese told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster, integrating the three areas makes sense for the patient, healthcare provider and the business model.
“The combination can be daunting,” Breese said. “There’s a lot of moving parts here like insurance companies and manufacturers and pharmacists. But we’ve dealt with the logistics side in our business, and we’ve built the hard part.”
The “hard part” has led NowRx to reimagine its business model. It already had proprietary software, artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and robotics to build its same-day prescription delivery business. Now, on Wednesday (March 10), it has launched a new offering that integrates lab work and telehealth into its platform.
Called NowRx Telehealth, it enables patients to interact with a doctor via a mobile app and then, if necessary, schedule the delivery of medication. And it has also branched out into the first example of an ambitious plan to develop proprietary models for specific disease states. NowRx is officially announcing the launch of NowPrEP, a service that streamlines access to HIV prevention medication, lab testing and a free, app-based consultation and assessment with a physician, plus same-day prescription delivery.
Breese acknowledged that NowRx’s path into the telehealth industry is quite different from nearly every other player in the market. But he said that’s because with this offering, the company is different from every other player in the market. It is the only firm with both a telehealth offering and its own same-day delivery pharmacy.
And although the company is starting small — with a single disease state in the markets in California and Arizona — it already serves the goal both bigger in scale and scope.
“At NowRx, we’re big believers in walking before we run,” Breese said. “Let’s make sure the telehealth platform is robust, patients are happy, physicians are happy before we start adding on other disease states and other specialties. Ultimately, we want to solve problems in healthcare.”
NowPrEP And The Telehealth Push
When asked why NowRx started with HIV prep, Breese said that in many ways, the friction existing in the prescription process presented a perfect disease state as the company’s trial run of its holistic telehealth offering.
The medication is intense enough and it requires regular follow-up visits and lab testing, he said. Those are friction points that could be easily alleviated by technology properly leveraged.
“We have gone to great lengths to build into our telehealth platform, not only access to the pharmacy but also tech lab work,” Breese said. “So, a provider that’s on the platform can review a patient’s profile, review all the questionnaire information that they will have completed, order a prescription, order a lab and get the lab results back into the platform all under one cohesive digital healthcare experience. So much easier and better for the patient, but also much easier and better for the physician as well.”
That’s why physician referrals are far and away NowRx’s most prolific patient referral channel, representing roughly 95 percent of patient referrals. And the company doesn’t compensate physicians for those referrals, he said; it is banned from doing so by law. The referrals come because the NowRx service ends up being better for both sides of that healthcare transaction.
And while HIV is the company’s chosen starting place, NowRx’s goal is to create this kind of holistic end-to-end telehealth journey in a host of other ailments after perfecting the process with HIV prep. Anxiety/depression, dermatology, fertility and cardiac care are all possible future expansions, Breese said, as the future is both wide and opportunity filled.
“I’ve always thought that telehealth was really the wave of the future,” he said. “We always felt that delivery pharmacy is a critical component.”
The Journey To Scale
The latest launch will be targeted to the markets in California and Arizona, which the firm already serves, with an eye toward expanding nationwide and onto other disease states going forward.
There are challenges and friction in that process, and NowRx must raise money, apply for licenses, and wait a few months for approvals to come in. But what sets the company apart and makes its offering different from everything else in the market is the full-service pharmacy tech stack it built as its entry point into the market.
Breese told Webster that entry point is what the company believes will make them able to offer a one-of-a-kind telehealth experience that works better for patient and providers.
“We have the technology know-how to build the right kind of platform for the best consumer experience,” Breese said. “We’ve proven we know how to master customer expectations and customer experience on the pharmacy side. And so, we think we’re at the forefront of where the industry needs to be in terms of accessibility, convenience, user experience, and comprehensiveness of the offering with the labs, with the physicians and with the pharmacy all rolled up.”
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